RISE Report Summary

The Rise Home Systems for human-social services

The Rise Home Systems (RHS) is one of the key components under development. Hardware and software modules are targeted to support specific applications for human-social services such as safety, security, tele-alarm, remote health monitoring and interpersonal communication (ie entertainment). This home automation system is based on a network infrastructure capable of supporting the interconnection of sensors, actuators, wireless general purpose transmission units and personal computers (PC). The main features are data acquisition of the sensor values (gas, smoke, leaks, movement detection), local actuation, tele-alarm for remote verification (auto dial and voice exchange), gateways to external networks (transmission of alarm messages to a remote operator), general purpose device plugging (eg electrocardiogram, ECG, modality for health monitoring), PC plugging (eg for ECG retrieval, games) and network management (control and monitoring of the distributed devices). The product is a cost effective solution targeting current market needs. Its design is based on the requirements imposed by the users (doctors, visiting doctors, social workers, elderly). From the user point of view, numerous human-social benefits will result such as continuous monitoring of the elderly living at home, enhancement of the feeling that they are not alone, facilitating the work of visiting doctors and social workers. This work has also contributed to the architectural design of home automation systems currently under standardization in Europe, in particular concerning protocol stack services and APIs for home networks, generic application services, low rate multimedia data in the home network, device interfaces, gateway services to external networks, control and monitoring of the control network.